Measuring Pain
When my daughter died at birth in 2005, I attended a local grief group for parents who had lost children in similar circumstances. One of the rules of this group was that we were not to compare one person’s loss to another’s, to minimize our own losses or to minimize anyone else’s. Everyone’s pain was treated as equal. We were all the same in our grief.
Nonetheless, it was difficult not to fall back on measuring one pain versus another’s. A mother who had lost a child at “only” ten weeks pregnancy seemed to think her grief could not be as great as a woman who had lost a child at age one, because that mother had had more time to become attached to her child. But there were reverse comparisons. Sometimes I heard from women who felt that I was “lucky” because I had photos of my daughter that I “could display.” Some women had no photos at all or photos that showed terrible birth defects. I struggled not to shout that I couldn’t display my photos, either, because a little girl had seen a photo only of my daughter’s hands and had complained that it was scary to see a dead baby on my walls.
Our society does seem to have certain rules about when great displays of grief are “allowed.” A woman who loses her husband young is expected to grieve for years. A child who dies in Kindergarten will never be forgotten. But those who lose children before they ever take a breath, before they are named or seen by others, seem to be expected to “move on” quickly. Those whose loved ones have “had a good life" or who are seen to have “had a good death” are also expected to accept the end more readily. If you’ve had a chance to say goodbye it seems you’re expected to grieve more quickly than if the death is sudden and unexpected.
The more I see people in grief, the more I think that there is no way to know in advance how you will grieve or what things will seem to matter to you. Feeling guilt is a factor, but it isn’t the only thing that extends grief. Other losses can seem to compound your sad feelings, or bring them back up again to discover that they are still unresolved. I’ve heard people insist that showing great grief means you’ve experienced great love. I’ve heard other people say the opposite, that a great display of grief shows nothing about the love you felt for a person—that it is a kind of selfishness.
I used to think that losing a child at birth was the worst possible tragedy. It was something I dreaded each time I got pregnant. I lived through losing a child over and over again in my mind. I think some part of me believed that if I practiced this kind of tragedy, it would somehow either make sure it never happened because I would see the signs and pay attention to them—or that I would be prepared for it. I was not prepared for it. There is no practicing for grief. There is also no way of knowing how you will move through it. There’s no way of knowing in advance what will help, either.
If you’d asked me before it happened, I would have said that saying a simple “I’m sorry” would be meaningless and that offering me a story of why God had allowed this to happen would be far more helpful, but in the actuality, the reverse was true. All I wanted to hear was “I’m sorry.” I’d thought gifts of flowers (which I’d always hated) would be foolish and that other kinds of donations would matter more, but in the event, I wanted flowers for myself. I wanted things that gave me the message that I was allowed to be selfish, that I was allowed to grieve however I came to it.
I think it was a good rule in that grief group, the reminder that you can’t point to one person who is experiencing a different grief than yours, and think you’re superior to them or that they are luckier than you. Grief is what it is. It’s not a sign of being more flexible or more faithful to carry grief more or less than someone else. It’s a unique experience that just happens to you when it happens to you. My grief changed me irrevocably. I hate it, and yet without it, I wouldn’t be a person I could recognize as myself. There are so many contradictions in grief, and the only thing I’ve found that helps everyone is to allow them the space and the support to be wherever they are for however long they are there, and to judge them not at all for being different than you.